Sophie's Vintage Quilt

I'd like to slowly create a record here of quilts I've finished over the years, so I'll take you slowly back in time over the next few posts.

Today's entry is a quilt I made for a friend's 50th birthday. Sophie loves vintage stuff and fabrics are some of her favourite vintage things, so when I came across Retro Age Fabrics online, but based in Melbourne (where she lives), I knew I'd find something that Sophie would like.  Because I was short of time and nervous about cutting up lovely old fabric and making a mess of it, not showing it off to its full potential, I decided to make a whole cloth quilt.

Sophie prefers blues and reds to browns and greys,  so the blue and black leaf floral 1940s dress cotton was perfect. I do like browns and greys and I thought the kona charcoal border set off the leaf print well.

If you look carefully in this picture you can see the tiny waffle texture of the leaf print.

I had some problems with the tension with the quilting- always seems to happen when it really matters for a gift and when there are time constraints... I tried fiddling with the tension, but that always seems to be a slippery slope to worse problems, luckily I'd noted where it was to start with, so I could unpick and get back to square one.  I'd decided to outline quilt around some (not all) of the leaves and I wanted to use a cream on the front, so it wouldn't show against the background and a grey on the back, since my quilting still needs more practice and wasn't going to be perfect, but there was no way I could get the threads to intersect in the middle of the quilt and I had to settle for pinpricks of white showing on the back. :-(  It was fine on the border where I used the same thread front and back to do some straight-line quilting.

I'd love to know if you've ever had this problem and how can I improve it? Perhaps the threads were different brands and that was the problem? Whenever I use the same colour thread front and back it never seems to be a problem, but maybe it just doesn't show as much??

I left the back plain except for an X paper pieced with the tiny remnants of the print and printed a label on to that fabric you can buy to print on.  I can't even remember properly what I did now, but I think I photocopied a piece of the kona charcoal to get the colour and then put the writing in a text box on top of that image and then printed it onto the natural colour cotton fabric. Something like that anyway!

I bound it in a tiny 1950s small circle and dot quilting weight cotton also bought from Retro Age. The dots are truly tiny, but the little touch of red gives a little lift to the edge.

Linking up with a new Link up Something Old Something New!